5th Sunday of Easter, Year C - May 15th, 2022

After several weeks of absence, Breaking Open the Word is back! We are always happy to bring you the fruits of our weekly Scripture Sharing, and we hope that they increase your own desire to read and ponder God’s Word in union with the Church’s liturgical year.

A Sister opened our sharing this Sunday by pointing out an interesting paradox in the First Reading. Most of the passage is an account of Paul and Barnabas’ intense apostolic work, an almost dizzying litany of their different accomplishments in the spread of the Gospel. However, at the end the two missionaries describe “what God had done” during their travels. So which is it? Is it Paul and Barnabas’ work, or God’s? The answer is a classic Catholic “both-and”! Though the Lord is perfect in Himself and has no need whatsoever of our help, He has chosen in His mysterious providence to make use of human instruments in His work of salvation. Jean Corbon, in his masterpiece Wellspring of Worship, describes this interaction of divine and human agency as “synergy”: a coming together of two “energies” to make a united whole. Of course, God is supreme and His part far outweighs our own, but He has lovingly given us the enormous dignity of cooperating as living and free instruments in His merciful plan. At times, the glory of the Christian vocation to cooperate with God is hidden and difficult to see. However, with practice and grace we can come to understand with Jesus that “the Father is glorified in the Son” both in suffering and in joy.

We spent the remainder of our Scripture sharing in a discussion of the beautiful Second Reading, with its promise of “a new heavens and a new earth." One Sister brought out how powerfully this passage highlights the tenderness and intimacy of God’s love for humanity. St. John could have truthfully written that “The dwelling of God is in the heavens, and He will reign as sovereign forever.” However, what the Lord said to him was rather different: “The dwelling of God is with the human race. He will dwell with them … and God Himself will always be with them as their God.” Of all the features He could have chosen to highlight in His description of the new creation, God focuses on His closeness to humanity. He goes on to further accentuate this point by listing with great detail the sufferings that He will remedy in the age to come: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain …” It is as if He wants to reassure us that no sorrow of mankind has escaped His notice, that all our anguish matters to Him, and that He wishes to bring complete and total healing to our hopelessly wounded condition. We are so accustomed to evil and suffering that we can hardly imagine a world without it, but God insists that in this new heaven and earth, “the old order has passed away.” What a word of comfort spoken into our broken world!

Then comes that powerful statement, issuing from the throne of the Father: “Behold, I make all things new.” In a sense, this is the climax and culmination of all history, the final proof that God’s plan of love will ultimately prevail over evil in the world. But this Divine victory is unique in that it does not destroy our past sorrows – it transforms them. Suffering is so interwoven with our day-to-day life that it becomes a part of who we are as human beings, and if that big element of our lives were to be simply blotted out, it might seem that it was ultimately meaningless. But the beautiful Catholic doctrine of redemptive suffering tells us otherwise: we know that “everything is grace,” as St. Therese would say. God wishes to take even the most tragic events of our lives and transfigure them into glory! The full realization of this truth, the final vindication of each person, will be manifest in the Resurrection. But the Father speaks His words of assurance in the present tense (“I make all things new”), reminding us that we can catch glimpses of this mysterious reality even in this life. It is a powerful and very real experience to look back at a time of suffering and realize that Christ and His grace were present to us in a way that they would not have been if all had gone well. The Saints agree that if we were to understand the real meaning and value of suffering, we would be in awe at the privilege and grace our Father is offering us in our daily cross!